General Chat / V For Vendetta - The Movie

Suddenly remembered I saw this movie in an excluse pre-screening on Monday, so here follows a long and inchorehently ranting post I made on another forum (do note that very heavy spoilers follows, and that I am a big fan of the original comic book. This was originally posted on a forum where most members who would read it are at least familiar with the source material, but I don't know how much NE knows. Also, this post was following another post by someone else who had also seen the movie and said a lot of the things I was going to say. Oh well.):

V is portrayed as slightly ridiculous and very human (in an apron cooking eggs, jokingly fencing with an old knight armor, breaking a mirror and crying as Evey leaves him and so on.

The Leader is replaced by a small angry man who screams all the time on large TV screens (an obvious Hitler caricature) rather than as a lonely, isolated human with a desperate relationship to a computer (which is entirely left out, by the way, making for some huge plot holes - although the question of how V can control all the megaphones on the streets is raised, it's never answered at all).

In the beginning when Evey gets in trouble with the finger men, she was not out to prostitute herself, instead, she was on her way to sleep with her boss Gordon who - despite being revealed later in the movie as a homosexual - regurlarly sleeps with younger women because he is expected to. Hm.

The whole sequence when Evey runs away from V and is taken in by Gordon is a bit strange. There are a lot of symmetry there - the scene when he cooks her breakfast closely mirrors the scene where V does the same, the scene where the finger men come and take Gordon away very much resembles the flashback scene where Evey's mother is arrested, and I think there were a few other such scenes. I'm not quite sure what the purpose of it is, though - is it about evolving and deepening the Evey character, is it meant to be a nod to Watchmen, is it just the Wachowskis trying to be clever for no particular reason?

V's terrorist action are done in a very different order from the comic, which I can understand why they changed, but it managed to destroy a few key scenes. As the Old Bailey is blown up by V at the very start of the scene, where he does something similar to the conducting scene in the comic, the scene between V and Justitia never happens, so a lot of V's motives go unexplained. It seems that V is fuelled mostly by revenge, which goes against the whole idea that V is just an ideal.

There is a very cheesy scene where V says to Evey that he thought he was unable to feel anything, but then she came along and he fell in love. What?

Lewis Prothero does seem like he would be more likely to appear on FOX News than British radio, which is probably the point. A lot of things seemed to have been included just because of 9/11 - there are references to the US as having torn the world with endless wars until it collapsed into a civil war; V mentions when he is plotting to blow up Parliament that destroying a single building can bring about great change; the media is used as a tool to instill fear in the population, even mentioning the avian flu.

Don't even get me started on the ending. V uses the British post company to send out V masks to everyone and no one has a problem with (it's not like an authoritarian government would check what is being manufactured and transported or anything) and the power of the V symbol and the anarchy it stands for is destroyed as masses of people dress up in identical uniforms and marches down the streets...

And so on. I could go on a lot longer about changed that annoyed me greatly and not-so-greatly (haven't even mentioned Finch, who plays a pretty big role in the movie, and his investigation, "Saint Mary's," the pointless Guy Fawkes opening scene, etc., etc.).

But as you notice, all I do is complain about how it was different from the comic, not how good it was as a movie. My friend, who has never read the comic, thought the movie was consistently great, and I think he might be right. I had a hard time relaxing and just enjoying the movie, because I like the source material so much I just found myself comparing it scene-to-scene instead of noticing the strenghts of the movie. And it was a good movie: the scene where V and Evey are introduced is great; Valerie's letter almost made me cry (even though they changed some of my favourite lines from it, such as "I know every inch of this cell. This cell knows every inch of me. Except one." [inexact quotation]) and it was exciting throughout.

If you do see it, and I would recommend it, don't think to much about the comic. Doing that almost ruined an otherwise enjoyable movie for me.

Oh and I thought it was kind of fun how Evey and V danced to "Bird Guhl" by Antony & The Johnsons, in the Shadow Gallery, which reminds me of one other thing I was going to mention. The movie, which was set sometime ten or fifteen years from today, seemed a bit unsure of what time period it should be in. Most things looked very much like the present day - cellphones, TVs, fashion - but there were some science fiction stuff that went by almost entirely unexplained such as a small (plot) device with a red light on it that seemed to jam recording devices, or something, while some parts of the movie looked a lot older - it was strange to see Valerie's life look almost exactly as in the comic, but set in 2015.

Sorry for the incoherence and any spelling mistakes.

Has anyone here seen it? What did you think of it?

I just saw it tonight and I didn't want to read this thread because of spoilers. Overall I thought it was very well done, I was hoping for some crazy ass action sequences a la matrix, but it didn't happen. Overall it was a very well done movie, B+.

Personally, the lack of "crazy ass action sequences a la matrix" was one of the things I liked the most about it (despite the knife time nonsense at the end), considering it was done by the Wachowski brothers.

The knife time shit was stupid. It wasn't even cool.